II.Rebutting the Myth That Tobacco Companies Don't Want Children to Smoke

Cigarettes are a Confederate product--from people who swore that their hatred of us is deep, enduring, and forever. In the Civil War, they mass slaughtered 600,000 of us. Cigarette ads target children to replace the 3,000 body count killed every day, as Warren Council President James Fouts says, "to find replacements for the adults they lose due to tobacco-related illnesses." Tobacco company intent/action when unrestrained by law is shown by this pre-restraint example of smoking--30% of 6 year old boys; 50% of "boys between 9 and 10"; 88% of boys over 11. See Dixon, On Tobacco, 17 Canadian Med Ass'n J 1531 (Dec 1927).

You may be told--falsely--that cigarettes are legal, so restricting advertising is wrong or unconstitutional. The truth is, cigarettes are not legal. Cigarette ads are inherently fraudulent as they convey the false opposite impression. It is illegal to provide people the means--e.g., a deleterious substance or mind-altering drug--to injure or kill themselves. People v Carmichael, 5 Mich 10; 71 Am Dec 769 (1858); People v Kevorkian, 447 Mich 436, 494-6; 527 NW2d 714, 738-9 (1994). It is illegal even if death is slow, and takes years. People v Stevenson, 416 Mich 383; 331 NW2d 143, 145-6 (1982).

(Due to acalculia, impairment of mathematical comprehension and reactivity, and due to abulia, impairment of willpower, and self-defense, impulse and ethical controls-- underlying 90% of crime--and
due to anosognosia, lack of comprehension of
their impairments, smokers cannot understand the danger that these numbers depict, in effect, going far above the chemicals' "speed limit.")

Many people still alive then remembered that Confederates--the source of tobacco--had fought for the right to torture and kill. That right, which underlay slavery, had been repeatedly upheld in southern courts, e.g., Com v Turner, 26 Va 678 (1827); State v Mann, 13 NC 263 (1829); Neal v Farmer, 9 Ga 555 (1851); and Com v Souther, 48 Va 673 (1851). So in 1909, there was prudent suspicion that "unreconstructed Southerners" wanted revenge, and would manipulate so as to torture and poison Northerners. There was (see § V) evidence of poisoning, rat poison in cigarettes--put there in revenge by the bitter Confederate soldiers who returned to tobacco farming and manufacture.

Re the tobacco-crime link, known since the Auburn Report (1854), Confederates were inordinately interested. Why? to unleash a crime epidemic on the hated U.S. After Reconstruction, they manipulated southern state constitutions' crime clauses to disenfranchise blacks. See Shapiro, Confederates and Crime, 103 Yale Law J 537-566 (Nov 1993). To counteract abolitionist warnings to blacks not to smoke, they unleashed advertising targeting blacks (now at issue). Why? to hook them on the gateway drug, then other drugs (even tobacco antidotes) that they manipulated lawmakers to ban.

Further manipulations:

(1) Denouncing prohibition of the gateway drug;

(2) supporting prohibition of post-gateway drugs;

(3) claiming prosecution of white violators of anti-gateway drug (cigarette) law burdens the judicial system, but prosecuting blacks for post-gateway drug use does not;

"[I]t is largely used as an adulterant of smoking tobacco . . . [for its intoxicating, addicting effect]. Hence . . . cigarette-smoking . . . is assuming the proportions of a great national evil." Laurence Johnson, M.D., A Manual of the Medical Botany of North America (NY: William Wood & Co, 1884), pp 170-1.

"It] has been used commercially for many years--mainly in cigarettes . . . harvest of [it] is expanding . . . The composition of one flavoring extract that includes [it] was patented in 1961. . . . About two million pounds of cured plants are harvested annually. . . . Because [it] is a perennial and the roots are not harvested, maintaining populations is not a problem. A decrease in plant populations has not been noted." Source: Krochmal, Trilisa odoratissima, 23 Econ Bot 185-6 (1969).

In the cigarette litigation case, Mike Moore, Attorney General ex rel State of Mississippi v American Tobacco Co, et al, No 94-1429, Jeffrey Wigand, Ph.D., an ex-tobacco company scientist, admitted coumarin (rat poison) in tobacco. Flouting the above public domain data, tobacco company attorney Thomas Bezanson objected, not as untrue, but "on trade secret grounds." See Philip Hilts, Smoke Screen: The Truth Behind The Tobacco Industry Cover-Up (NY: Addison-Wesley Pub Co, 1996), pp 161-163. Such attorney concealment appears to be misconduct, an attempt to fraudulently conceal the fact the data has long been published in the public domain.

A. Tobacco ads fraudulently fail to warn that cigarettes' toxic chemicals cause abulia, impair impulse and ethical controls. Cigarettes are the delivery agent for nicotine, the gateway (starter) drug on which children are first hooked (average age 12). Alcohol follows, 12.6; then marijuana, 14. See the DHEW book, Research on Smoking Behavior, Research Monograph 17, page vi; Fleming, et al., "The Role of Cigarettes in The Initiation And
Progression Of Early Substance Use," 14 Addictive Behaviors 261-272 (1989); and the DHHS book, Preventing Tobacco Use Among Young People: A Report of the Surgeon General (1994). Page 10 warns that "Illegal sales of tobacco products are common."

B. Due to their toxic chemicals, cigarette use (even by so-called consenting adults in the privacy of their homes) causes physical disorders such as lung cancer, but worse, the now lesser known condition--abulia. Abulia's result is not private but public, a most prominent feature of which is crime. Effects such as tobacco-induced lung cancer were unknown in the 19th century, but tobacco-induced abulia (thus crime) was. It was a prime concern that 90% of persons in prison are typically smokers, a fact unchanged since 1854 despite the vast societal changes since then. Tobacco's role in crime has been cited many times by law enforcement officials, judges, and doctors since the Auburn Report (1854), e.g., by Hodgkin, 1857; Ellis, 1901; Lindsay, 1914; Torrance, 1916; Brum, 1924; Danis, 1925; Healy and Bonner, 1926; Crane, Dawson, Pollock, and Shaw, 1931; Wood, 1944, etc.

"Nowhere is the practice of smoking more imbedded than in the nation's prisons and jails, where the proportion of smokers to non-smokers is many times higher than that of society in general." Doughty v Board, 731 F Supp 423, 424 (D Col, 1989).

As smoking causes abulia, acalculia, and anosognosia, impairing impulse and ethical controls, most crime is committed by smokers.

C. Due to advertising and selective locationing, minorities are sold cigarettes disproportionately, so targeted into drug use. See Klonoff, et al, Sales of Cigarettes to Minors, 87 Am J Pub Health 823-6 (May 1997), and the Surgeon General Report (1998). So, pursuant to the post-Reconstruction era Confederate racism and manipulations, whereas pre-Civil War, it was mostly white smokers in prison, it is still smokers in prison, but they are now mostly black. We need to stop the discriminatory targeting process. To protect both black and white, abolitionist Michigan banned cigarettes.

Due to cigarettes' deleteriousness, "Over 37 million people (one of every six Americans alive today) will die from cigarette smoking years before they otherwise would," Department of Health, Education, and Welfare book, Research on Smoking Behavior, Research Monograph 17, DHEW Publication ADM 78-581, page v (Dec 1977). Such deaths are "natural and probable consequences," a term defined in Black's Law Dictionary, 6th ed (St. Paul: West Pub Co, 1990), page 1026. Deaths from cigarettes' deleteriousness occur so frequently as to be expected to happen again and again, hence meet the definition.

Our deleterious cigarette ban MCL § 750.27, MSA § 28.216, follows the wise 19th century concept of criminalizing fraudulent sales, snake-oil sales, etc., not the buying. The concept was that criminalizing buying and use makes too many criminals, promotes disrespect for law, and punishes the victim of the fraudulent sale. This is especially true with children, below the age of maturity and consent to even make contract decisions. We criminalize leaving one's refrigerator outside with the lock on ( MCL § 750.493d, MSA § 28.761(4)), not unsuspecting children who fall prey to it.

By banning the gateway drug, not a post-gateway drug such as alcohol, MCL § 750.27, MSA § 28.216, avoids the error of Prohibition, and puts personal responsibility on those with most knowledge of the contraband substance (manufacturers and sellers), not on unwary consumers, often children. Michigan's well-reasoned law is an example for all. Wherefore this proposed implementation, insofar as it deals with the gateway drug, warrants support.